Photoshop party

I treated myself to a new icon for alison_1669.



Took a half-hour exactly, and most of that was dicking with fonts. I'm getting better at this.

Sleep now. *thunk*

On the Job

[Note to infodump: actually, most of the time I quite like my job. The pay's good, I feel I'm helping people and the last two days of the week are, on the whole, stress-free because none of the doctors I work for are in. Today ... well, let's make an exception for today.]

I want that fucking registrar's head for a football. Lord knows it's wasted on the job it currently has...

Three phone calls in quick succession this morning asking, "Where's my [family member]'s chemotherapy appointment?" All three saw this fucking registrar on the 23rd. Okay, fine, he's got a temp in. The letters are shite -- question marks everywhere, no corrections made, half the sentences make no goddamn sense -- but he saw these patients a week and a half ago. Surely information like, "My patients need chemo" should've stuck in his puny little brain by now.

But no. Two of the three families were as nice as they could be about the fact that their loved ones were having to wait. And I'm always grateful when that happens -- I can understand people being upset because they feel they're being lost in the system. General irritation -- fine. Rude personal remarks, not so fine. Basically, despite the fact that I am not this registrar's secretary, I have had nothing to do with this patient and I am certainly not responsible for anything on the wards, this woman decided to turn around to me and say quite plainly, "get on with this because you're not doing your job".

...I'm not doing my job? I am not the doctor. I am not the one who's supposed to book the appointments. I have nothing to do with the wards. Even if I did, I wouldn't know because not only am I not the doctor who's supposed to be dealing with this, I am not his secretary either. How the hell is it that I'm not doing my job when the job thrown at me isn't even remotely my job in the first place? She didn't even care that I wasn't the secretary she had spoken to a couple of days ago, just saying, "Oh, well, one of you people, then". 'You people'?!? Yoda on a crutch, are we living in a caste system now? Am I an Untouchable? Is Ah a good nigger? What? Since when does running the lives of three doctors make you a second-class citizen?

To make matters worse, she was yet another person who threw "if it was your family member, you'd be like this too". I'm sorry, but first of all, no. I was there a couple of years back. We had to deal with a lot of medical staff, some shitty out-of-the-woodwork family members (one of them a devout Baptist who told me that reading Anne Rice was letting the devil into the world through me, or some such rubbish -- this while I'm trying to get my mind off my grandfather dying in a hospital bed a mile away), two aunts with varying degrees of mental retardation, funeral directors and sundry Alcoholics Anonymous members. I was never once that rude, that insensitive, that unmindful of the feelings of others. Now, I could take "grief and worry" as an excuse if you turned around after being a bitch and said, "I'm sorry; I've been on edge, what with everything that's been going on, and I shouldn't have taken it out on you". But if you have the presence of mind to use that as an excuse in the way this woman did, it isn't one. Full stop.

Gaaaaah. When I called the registrar to tell him that another one of his precious charges had slipped through the cracks, I put it to him thusly: "I've just had a call from the very unpleasant daughter of [patient], who was told her mother needed to go in for chemotherapy. As there has been no appointment forthcoming, the daughter is accusing me of not doing my job".

He went very quiet for a minute, then offered to have a word with the patient's daughter. Oh, god no. I wanted to be the one to ring her two minutes after she bitched at me and say, "All fixed now. Bow before me and grovel, you miserable bitch, because I could've made your life a nightmare of stress and waiting but I'm a better person than you'll ever be". It's amazing how you can convey that sentiment when you're actually saying, "Yes; an appointment has been made for [date] at [time] and you'll need to go to [ward and directions]".

She did say thank you, at least.

That interview meme again

1. Leave a comment saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I'll reply and give you five questions to answer.
3. You'll update your LJ with the five questions answered.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

Questions from nadriel

1) Same as for mine - name the song or songs that are your theme tune(s).

Oh, sweet mother of shit, I'm supposed to answer that? Okaaaay... You know how depressing this is going to be?

Silverchair -- "Freak"
Garbage -- "Only Happy When it Rains"
The Beatles -- "Paperback Writer" (hey; it had to be there)

2) Do you believe that life has a purpose, and if so what? If not, why not?

You know, I've never been sure? I used to think that there was no point to life but then I figured out that really Zen thing about how sometimes the journey is more important than the destination. In the meantime, I use the old "Schroedinger's Cat" theory about life having a purpose -- there might be one, there might not be one, and the way to determine that would probably be to die. Since I don't want to do that, I just make my own temporary purpose.

3) If you had a choice between you being happy, everyone else being unhappy, and the world being a better place, or everyone else being happy, you being unhappy, and the world being a worse place overall, which would you choose.

Okay, this question makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. If everyone was unhappy, how could the world be a better place? More to the point, if everyone else was unhappy, how could the world be a worse place than now, where everyone's just deluding themselves that they're happy because they're too scared to think about it one way or the other? And my happiness really doesn't enter into it. I'd like the world to be a better place, but it's not going to happen, particularly not with all your unhappy people wandering around looking for someone to punch. I'd like everyone to be happy and can't see how the world could be an overall worse place if people were happier in it, so I guess I'll go for the second option.

4) When, why and how did you get into roleplaying?

Depends what you mean by "get into". Mum bought me D&D for Christmas one year but we never played -- I didn't really have enough friends to. aberranteyes introduced me to White Wolf sometime around 2000 but I really couldn't get all that het up. I tried to run a GURPS Mage online group a couple of years ago but that fell through due to faff and I hated the GURPS system anyway. I only got really enthusiastic in around October last year, when I met cholten99 and he introduced me to 7th Sea. I probably would've left it at that but there were RPG books everywhere by that time and it was so much fun (writing! Acting! Hanging out! Freaking out the neighbours!) that I just got hooked.

5) Cake or death? (In as many words as necessary, reading whatever you like into the question. Use full grammar and punctuation. Answer in any of the following: Ancient Greek, Sumerian, Klingon or English)

Both -- "Let them eat cake!" "Morte la reine!" *chop* (And yes, I know there's French in there, but I was never a big rule-follower.)

Interview, again

Well, people've already seen the entry in which I ask if they want to be interviewed. But I got another set of questions from purpleperil, so...

1. Why did you write TLAS?

Yeah; long story. See, I first got into Daria because a friend of mine rang me up and screeched, "Do you have MTV? If so, turn on the telly right now because there's this girl on this cartoon and she is you, I swear!" So I did and whaddya know? From then on, there were jokes. Lots of them. After awhile, I got on the Net, discovered fan fiction and decided, what the hell, let's see what it would be like if Daria really was more like me. That's how I wrote "I am (NOT!) Daria". Except I thought it was crap and never wanted it posted. Ever. However, there were a few jokes in it that were too good not to use. So I thought of another way -- a look-alike. It was going to be a stand-alone; one 13-fic 'season', tops. (She says five and a quarter seasons later...)

2. If you could change one thing in your life, past or present what would it be?

My parents, probably. I know I'm nowhere near the only person who can claim this, but that quote "They fuck you up, your mum and dad" really applies in my case. I might not be the violent yet somehow repressed fuck-up I am today. But on the other hand, I like me pretty well these days, so I might not bother even if I could change anything.

3.Have you ever really admired someone and then found out more about them and lost total respect and admiration for them? and if so how did you deal with it?

Oh God yes; numerous times. The most recent and memorable time, I got really confused, really stressed, yelled a lot, once punched a wall and then stuck by them. After all, I knew who they really were and what they were really like, and they were still my friends -- just for different reasons.

4. What is your oldest/most prized possession?

My oldest possession is a quartz pendant -- I got it in 1994 and, apart from a couple of short occasions, I haven't taken it off since I got it. I guess you could say that it's my most prized possession too.

5. What is your guilty pleasure in life?

By 'guilty', I take it you mean 'something I'd normally refuse to admit to'? Well, I may well be over that phase now, but for most of my life, my guiltiest pleasure was VC Andrews novels. Yes, I know they're repetitive crap, but they're my repetitive crap.